16 March 2011

Hammersmith in top ten for child poverty in London. Nearly 11,000 children living in penury.

Four out of every ten children in Hammersmith & Fulham are being raised in deprivation, new figures from End Child Poverty show. That's almost eleven thousand children across the borough.

In College Park & Old Oak, six out of ten children are living in poverty, as are over half of children in Wormholt and White City. More than four in ten children live below the poverty line in Sands End, Shepherd's Bush Green and North End. The same is true for over a third of children who live in Hammersmith Broadway, Fulham Broadway and Askew. See figures for all wards below.

We can expect local children's life chances to be further damaged as H&F Tory council's unnecessarily savage cuts to children's services, including Sure Start early years centres, begin to bite and national benefits are reduced.

Overall, H&F has the tenth highest share of children living in poverty of the 33 London councils, with 36% of children living in families below the poverty line. In its triborough partner Westminster the figure is 41% and in Kensington & Chelsea it is 29%.

David Cameron said in 2007, "We can make British poverty history, and we will make British poverty history". Instead, his government and Tory councils like H&F are making things grimmer for children and families.

The analysis was undertaken for the End Child Poverty campaign by Donald Hirsch and Jacqueline Beckhelling of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. Children are classified as being in poverty if they live in families that receive out-of-work benefits or in-work tax credits where they earn less than 60 per cent of median income.